Subject to Change
A lot of history episodes and a lot of film episodes. A few other subjects in between!
Subject to Change
Imperial Twilight: How Trade, Tea, and Opium Led to War
The story of the Opium War is one of history's most consequential yet widely misunderstood conflicts. Professor Stephen Platt joined me to unravel the fascinating web of events that led Britain and China into a collision that would reshape Asia and the global balance of power for centuries to come.
Far from being a simple tale of drug dealers backed by imperial force, Stephen reveals cultural misunderstandings, diplomatic failures, and economic pressures eventually converging with devastating consequences. We talked about the Canton trading system where all Western trade was restricted to a tiny compound "smaller than the footprint of one of the pyramids in Egypt," and how Britain's insatiable appetite for tea created a massive trade imbalance that would eventually be filled by opium.
The conversation takes us through extraordinary attempts at cross-cultural communication, from James Flint (the only Englishman alive who could speak Chinese in 1759) to the disastrous McCartney Embassy where diplomatic relations collapsed over the kowtow ritual. Stephen explained how a panicking British captain effectively made Queen Victoria "the largest holder of opium in the world" by buying merchants' illegal drugs on the government's behalf—a fateful decision that created the legal pretext for war.
Perhaps most surprising is how fiercely contested this war was within Britain itself, with Parliament nearly voting to end the conflict by a margin of just five votes. The Times of London coined the term "Opium War" specifically to shame the government for fighting on behalf of drug dealers.
Join us for this exploration of a pivotal moment when two civilizations, each convinced of their own superiority, failed to understand one another with consequences that continue to echo in our time.
Stephen's book Imperial Twilight concentrates on the causes of the war more than the war itself. And in particular the people at the heart of it all. Utterly brilliant stuff.
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, russell Hogg. My guest today is Stephen Platt. Stephen is Professor of Chinese History at the University of Massachusetts and he's written a number of books, of course, but I think he's best known for two. There is Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, which is about the Taiping Civil War in China, which took place in the 1850s on a truly astonishing scale. But today we're going to talk about Imperial Twilight, which tells the story of the so-called Opium War between Britain and China, which broke out in 1839. And I don't want to hang around in the introduction, but I'll just tell you that this book is narrative history at its absolute finest, and the twists and turns in the story leading up to the war, they're just extraordinary. Anyway, welcome, stephen, to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it is an absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 1:So I guess, just to orientate the listeners, could you tell us a bit about the trading system at Canton. When did the foreigners first show up and what's the system between them and the Chinese, but trade is very informal in the 17th century and later.
Speaker 2:It's really in the 18th century that things take off.
Speaker 2:So the period from 1760 all the way up until really the end of the Opium War in 1842, that whole period, the British were restricted to trading at one single port in the Qing Empire, known to them as Canton, and this was a port at the very south of the empire, about as far from Beijing as you could get, and this was a regulation of the Chinese government. The emperor had restricted the trade to this port in order to keep an eye on it, essentially in order to make sure that he got proper tax revenues from it. So for the British and for the Americans when they came along, and for other foreigners, the late 18th and early 19th centuries were a period of extremely limited trade with China. They could only trade with a handful of merchants on the Chinese side who had a monopoly. They were known as the Hong merchants, and they had to conduct their trade at this really quite tiny compound, a very luxurious compound, these beautiful European-style buildings that were built for them. There's a compound about 200 yards by 300 yards.
Speaker 2:That really is absolutely tiny, yeah, in this little complex of buildings, all of the legal aboveboard trade of Great Britain with China, which was the largest empire on earth at the time, all that went on in this tiny little compound. Some of the foreigners there like to point out that it's smaller than the footprint of one of the pyramids in Egypt, gloymy.
Speaker 1:And they have this thing. They're called factories and I was hugely confused by this for many, many years. But when they say factories, they don't mean factories as we understand them, do we?
Speaker 2:No, it's a term from British India. A factor was a merchant or a trader. So these buildings there are 13 buildings and they're called the 13 factories, but really they're residences for the foreign merchants and warehouses for them to store their goods. As I said, it's a very pleasant place. It's restrictive, but they were packed to the ceiling with Chinese servants waiting on the foreigner's hand and foot.
Speaker 1:They even had menial servants who would pull ropes in order to keep the ceiling fans spinning to keep them comfortable it at the time, because it seems that at the time nobody in Europe really seems to know and it's incredibly hard to find out. And I'm thinking, of course, about the attempt by James Flint to get an audience, to try and get better access so they can find out. But what is China like at that time?
Speaker 2:China was widely viewed from the outside as being the largest, most unified, most prosperous empire on earth. It had a lot of problems internally though. So China at this time was ruled by the Qing dynasty, which were Manchus. They were not ethnically Chinese. They had conquered the Ming dynasty in 1644, beginning in 1644. So by the time you get to the Opium War, the Qing Dynasty has been around for almost 200 years.
Speaker 2:The early part of the dynasty was a period of massive warfare in all different directions into Central Asia, along the coast of China, in Southern China, against the Russians, you name it. But the period that we're looking at here the period of the Canton trade starting in 1760, is a period of just enormous peace and prosperity for the central heartland of China, and those massive wars, which were primarily in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, established borders for this massive empire that ensured that in the heartland they were generally not threatened with war, there wasn't major disorder, there were new world crops coming in so that land could be cultivated that hadn't been used before, and the upshot of all of this is that during the reign of the Emperor Qianlong, who's the one who restricts the trade in 1760., during his reign, which runs for much of the 18th century. The population of China essentially doubles from what it had been during the Ming Dynasty.
Speaker 1:Blimey, I mentioned this guy, james Flint, and he sort of sent off by well, I'm not quite sure, I think it's the East India Company sends him off to try and sort of investigate and see if they can form relations. But I was astonished at how hard the Chinese fought to sort of keep themselves private. So do you want to say a little bit about James Flint?
Speaker 2:Poor James Flint I should say here. I mean, I mentioned that there was a monopoly on the Chinese side, that there are the Hong merchants and they are the only ones allowed to trade with the British. But of course there's also a monopoly on the British side, which is that the only British firm that is allowed to trade in the Far East is the British East India Company, the English East India Company. So, james Flint, in 1759, he was the only Englishman alive who could speak Chinese, blimey, and he was this sort of poor, unfortunate soul. He'd been an orphan. A British ship's captain brought him to Canton and sort of dropped him off there as a boy, with the goal that maybe he could learn Chinese and make himself useful. Then the ship's captain went off and died in a shipwreck oh dear.
Speaker 2:So yeah, poor, unfortunate James Flint grows up in Canton in the nearby Portuguese enclave of Macau, becomes fluent in Chinese and he's essentially raised by the East India Company and he works for them. And when the English ships are at port he dresses like an Englishman and then when they leave he wears Chinese robes. He's sort of like a very early crosser of cultures. And the truly unfortunate part for him comes in 1759, when the East India Company, which is quite frustrated about only being able to trade at Canton, largely because the main thing that the British have to sell is woolen goods and Canton is in the very far south of the empire, in a subtropical zone where nobody wants wool. So the British were hoping to get access to ports up in the north, where it actually got cold in the winter and they thought they could sell their woolen goods.
Speaker 2:So Flint, because he can speak Chinese, gets help from his teacher to write a petition in Chinese to the emperor, to Qianlong, then secretly sails up the coast of China, bribes his way up to the city of Tianjin, bribes somebody to bring this petition to the emperor, and the petition asks him to give new trading rights to the British, to open up new ports, to keep a better eye on corrupt Chinese officials who work with them, etc. And this is where you get a somewhat violent reaction from the Qianlong emperor he's furious. He's furious that this Englishman has managed to sail all the way up the coast and get close to the capital and to a place that he is not allowed and was not authorized to come to. In response to this petition, he issues the regulations firmly that Canton will be the only port they can trade in going forward. So it's really James Flint's mission that results in all trade being formally restricted to Canton.
Speaker 2:And then Flint himself gets sent back down to Canton, gets thrown into prison in Macau by the Chinese authorities, spends three years there and then is kicked out of the country entirely.
Speaker 1:And I believe his teacher of Chinese, something even worse happens to him.
Speaker 2:I mean, that is one of the very interesting points about how the Qing dynasty related to outsiders, Because for somebody like James Flint, if you were a foreigner in China, if you did anything short of killing somebody, generally the worst punishment you would get would be banishment. It was unusual for James Flint to be imprisoned for as long as he was and then he was sent on his way. The real punishment falls on the head of his Chinese teacher who, in the eyes of the emperor, believes that Flint, this Englishman, this barbarian, never would have been able to get anywhere forward from there. There is a regulation that Chinese are not allowed to teach their language to foreigners, and this only compounds the sense of mystery of the country that foreigners can't travel in it, they can't learn the language, they can't communicate directly with the government in Beijing. Again, they have these dreams of a massive market for their goods, um, and they're never going to be realized.
Speaker 1:So the next attempt to try and open up relations I think that's 1792, which is Lord McCartney's famous embassy and one of the things that struck me in your book was that there was sort of an, an ambiguous, you know, feeling from the East India Company where things weren't really going too badly. Trade was knocking along, and if it's not broken there's no need to fix it. But Lord McCartney, he goes on his way and I thought he was actually quite a sympathetic character in that he seemed to have, you know, when he, you know, as he arrives, he's full of respect for the Chinese and he, you know, he wants to make the world a better place. But you want to sort of tell a bit of the story of the McCartney embassy.
Speaker 2:He was well-meaning, you got to give him that and he tried his best and he had no idea how to conduct himself at the Chinese court. So he was the very first British ambassador sent to China. You are right that the East India Company was quite ambivalent about this. So the embassy was a joint venture of the British government and the East India Company, because the East India Company had to manage it logistically. But after Flint. So, mccartney, this is about 30 years after Flint was kicked out.
Speaker 2:After that the East India Company basically concludes that they just need to behave themselves and follow the rules and not do anything that could cause any harm to their China trade. And as a side note, I should explain here that you know the reason why the British don't just abandon trade at Canton and say, oh, this is humiliating, we don't want any part of it Off, we go to conquer some other part of the world. The whole reason for that is tea. This is a period when tea is becoming England's national beverage and the only place in the world that the British can get their tea is from China at this point in time. And the only place in China they can get it is at Canton. And the East India Company relied extremely heavily on tea imports, as did the British government, which at times took a 100% tax off the top. So the East India Company wasn't terribly keen on sending somebody to Beijing, but they got permission. This was all above board. They sent Lord McCartney and a whole retinue of gentlemen and musicians and scientists whole retinue of gentlemen and musicians and scientists. The whole strategy of this embassy was they wanted to impress and it's still Qianlong on the throne. They wanted to impress the Qianlong emperor with the ingenuity of the British. This is during the Industrial Revolution. They wanted to show their manufacturers, they wanted to show their mastery of science. They actually sent along a hot air balloon and a man to operate the hot air balloon with the goal of floating over Beijing and showing the Chinese that the British can fly. The whole purpose of this is so that the emperor will recognize the value of trade with the British and recognize them as civilized equals, and then the relationship will flourish.
Speaker 2:In reality, the whole embassy falls apart around an issue of protocol which is today known as the kowtow K-O-W-T-O-W. It lives on in English as being obsequiously deferential, but the kowtow was a formal ritual that anyone having an audience with the Qing emperor had to perform, which involved getting down on both knees and bowing to the ground three times, and then you get up and then you get down and you do it three more times, and you get up and then you get down and do it three more times. So nine deep kneeling bows to the ground, and again, this was technically to acknowledge the superiority of the Qing emperor. Embassies from neighboring states were welcome to come to Beijing as long as their ambassadors performed this ritual to show that their state was subordinate to China. And the ambassadors who came and performed this from Korea and elsewhere, they didn't actually think that their country was subordinate. But this was just something you did, this was a court ritual and then you would get good trade.
Speaker 2:The McCartney mission falls apart because McCartney does not want to do this. He sees it as humiliating. He sees it as an acknowledgement that the Chinese are superior to the British and, to his credit, he doesn't seem to think that the British themselves are superior to the Chinese. He just wants to be treated as an equal. So he offers to do what he would do for his own king, which is to go down on one knee. And the Chinese negotiators say no and he says well, further, I could do what I would do for my own king, which is, I would kneel on one knee and then I would kiss his hand. And the Chinese thought this was the most disgusting thing they had ever heard, because you do not touch the emperor, let alone rub your lips on him. And so in the end, mccartney claims I've found evidence that he probably kind of actually faked the kowtow when he went into his audience.
Speaker 2:But he comes back to England proclaiming that he has refused to humiliate Britain before the Chinese. He has refused the kowtow. But the result of all this is that the embassy is kicked out of China, with no trade concessions whatsoever and a famous edict from Qianlong to King George saying, basically, we have no need of your country's manufacturers, we have everything we need already, so just behave yourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I felt for McCartney. I felt so much effort and so little result and just sent packing with very little ceremony and it's actually quite interesting. You know Chang Long. You mentioned that he had been there since James Flint. I can't remember how many years between them there was, but his reign was incredibly long and at that time the reign of the emperors does seem to be quite long. I mean, it does seem to be an incredibly stable system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why China was so deeply admired in Europe. Qianlong ruled for 63 years. Effectively, he was the longest reigning monarch in China's entire history. So the stability that that projected that you could have a strong, stable government with emperors. You know, Qianlong's grandfather ruled for 60 years, during a time of change and revolution and war. That China was sort of this model of a sensible, orderly, stable, enduring government.
Speaker 2:And the Enlightenment philosophers loved China because, since it was Confucian, people like Voltaire viewed China as being sort of a perfect example of a state that does not need a church, that it was run by scholars and they were bookish and all these wonderful things. And the funny thing is that McCartney sort of tries to capitalize on this. Well, actually, really, his secretary, George Staunton, tries to capitalize on this because they don't know what to wear for their audience. They don't know what people wear in China and they want to look impressive. And so McCartney comes in this suit that he's kind of put together that's like all this crushed velvet and a huge plume of feathers and stuff because he thinks it'll look important feathers and stuff because he thinks it'll look important. But his secretary, George Staunton he has heard about how scholarly the Chinese are, and so he comes wearing his Cambridge gowns, thinking that then the Chinese will see that and recognize that the British are scholars as well. Brilliant.
Speaker 1:And despite the fact that it's stable even at this stage and you kind of adverted to one of the problems, which is population growth, but the regime, the Chinese realm, they do not only made it the largest empire on earth, like the whole population of the world in 1800 was about a billion people, so a third of the world was part of China at this point in time.
Speaker 2:The Achilles heel for the government, though? So it's a government by Manchus, but they are running a Confucian government based on Confucian virtues, because that's the easiest way to run China, and part of that involves filial piety, that you have to show reverence for your father and your grandfather, etc. Etc. And one of the major problems for Qianlong during his reign was that his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor all the way back in 1712, had felt confident enough in the establishment of the Manchus as the rulers of China that he issued an edict promising that the land taxes would never be raised. This is an issue, because the land taxes, which were about four-fifths of the Chinese government's revenue, were based on the size of a piece of land and how productive it was. It had nothing to do with how many people were living on it.
Speaker 1:Right. So as the number of people increases, the taxes don't Exactly so in the 18th century.
Speaker 2:You have this dramatic rise of population but you do not have a parallel rise in government revenue. So the larger the population becomes, the harder and harder it becomes for the imperial government to have enough officials and to keep track of all of them and to keep order. And this is where things start to fray. And they can't simply just raise taxes. That would be a violation of filial piety. It was his grandfather's promise. So actually, ironically at the time that Chen Long was saying to the british we have no need of your country's manufacturers, we don't need your trade. But you know, blah, blah, blah. The reality of that was that actually all of the silver that was coming in through foreign trade was. It was crucial for the chinese economy at this time and for the chinese government, because it was a revenue stream that was separate from the land taxes, right um, it actually paid for Qianlong's own household, his own household expenses Confucian system.
Speaker 1:You have this meritocracy where you have an examination system for the officials but that seems to just get completely out of control, where the number of candidates sort of overwhelms the ability of the system to pay for them and the whole thing seems to become somewhat corrupt. Did I get that right, you?
Speaker 2:absolutely did. The imperial exam system where you have to memorize the Confucian classics and there's an anonymous examination based on them. It was intended always to be a meritocracy that your name was not on your exam paper and you would be passed depending on your own brilliance and your own skill. The reality was that children of merchants and children of scholars had a great advantage because they could get tutors easily, whereas children of peasants generally needed to work in the fields. But the idea was that anyone who came along who was smart enough could study, could prepare for the exams and could become an imperial official. And the only way to become an official, the standard way to become an official, is to pass the exams. An official is to pass the exams.
Speaker 2:In this 18th century, into the 19th century period, what you have is that the population has doubled, so there are twice as many scholars competing for roughly the same number of imperial positions, and it was always extremely hard to pass the local level exam. You had about a 1% chance of passing. Then you would go to the provincial level where, again, only one out of 100 would generally pass the exam. So it was already a brutally difficult system. It got even harder and then, for even the scholars who passed the examinations, there wouldn't necessarily be a job for them. They would have to wait for somebody to retire or die to open up a position.
Speaker 2:And what starts creeping into the exam system during this period of rising population is to the system of imperial acquaintance is, as you said, corruption.
Speaker 2:If you are an official who controls a position below you and you're faced with 10 qualified candidates, you can ask them for a bribe and they'll pay you, and then maybe they have to keep paying you every year while they have their position, because you need that money, because you had to pay a bribe to get your own position. And by the end of the 18th century, this corruption has just eaten through the bureaucracy where, at every level of the bureaucracy, you have officials who are having to pay money to those above them and therefore having to squeeze money from people below them. And when you get to the very bottom of the imperial hierarchy, which is the lowest official, he's the district magistrate. The only people below him are ordinary people like landowning gentry, merchants, peasants, and so they start raising fees, they start forcing merchants to give contributions, and this is going to contribute to a breakdown of trust and faith between the general population and the government and is this what leads to the White Lotus rebellions, or is this something separate?
Speaker 2:It's related but largely separate.
Speaker 2:The White Lotus was a sort of an apocalyptic Buddhist sect, predicting that the Buddha was going to come back and the fallen world that we're in will be destroyed.
Speaker 2:A new paradise will be built, and if you are a loyal follower, you need to help that happen by collecting guns and gunpowder and preparing for the revolution. The area where the White Lotus really takes root, though, the conditions, are also an outgrowth of this overpopulation, that the cities become so grotesquely overpopulated that you have large-scale migration into China's interior, into areas of the empire, these internal frontiers of the empire, regions that are so mountainous and so thickly wooded that traditionally they've just been home to their aboriginal tribes that don't speak Chinese and are culturally Chinese. You get large numbers of Han Chinese settlers moving into these regions, cutting down trees, clearing land, getting into fights with the locals and the government, because it doesn't have the money to supervise these regions. There's very limited government control in these areas, and so the settlers many of them start turning to each other for security through mutual aid organizations or through religious sects like the White Lotus, and so the White Lotus is this peasant uprising that begins towards the end of the Qianlong reign that just ravages central China.
Speaker 1:Moving back to the British for a bit. They don't give up on trying to sort of grapple with what is China and trying to find out about it. And there's sort of a number of fascinating characters in your book. We don't probably have time to talk about all of them in detail, but I'm thinking about Morrison and Manning, but also in particular George Staunton and you actually mentioned George Staunton before, but that's George Staunton Sr, who's brought along George Staunton Jr on the McCartney embassy, and so I don't know, is he about 11 years old at the time that he turns up on the McCartney embassy? Something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, little George Staunton comes along and he makes a name for himself because he's the only member of the McCartney mission who manages to learn a little bit of Chinese. And so when they're at a banquet for the Qianlong emperor and he goes up and he says a few words of Chinese to the emperor and the emperor gives him a little purse token of his esteem. But back in Britain of course he's the boy wonder who has mastered Chinese and his father later then packs him off to Canton to make his living with the East India Company. He's part of the first generation since Flint of British who want to try to learn the Chinese language. And for Staunton this is for the sake of trade that he believes that if the British can learn to read Chinese contracts, if they can do negotiating on their own, then they won't have to rely on Chinese interpreters. So there are plenty of Chinese at Canton who can speak pidgin English, sort of a hybrid of English and Chinese, but they don't trust ethnic Chinese to be doing their negotiating. They want somebody who's British representing them. So you have sort of a trade impulse to learn Chinese. The other impulse is from missionaries.
Speaker 2:The Protestant missionaries begin to arrive in China in the early 19th century and there have been Catholics in. Yeah, missionaries start coming along. Is that for the Catholics? They believe that Chinese converts needed to learn Latin if they wanted to be able to read the Bible. They needed to have a priest on site, they had to have a church that they participated in, they needed to hear mass and have confession, so you had to have a missionary in place in China. On the ground.
Speaker 2:The Protestants, the London Missionary Society, had this vision that they believed in translation and if you could simply get, they believed that the Bible was translatable and so if you could just get it into the native language and somehow get it into China, then Chinese people would pick it up and they would read it and they would become Christians. And that was sort of the magical thinking of the missionaries. But in practical terms it meant that the most important part of the missionary enterprise was to try to learn the Chinese written language. And Robert Morrison, who you mentioned, is the first one to really do that, and he does it secretly, but in the course of preparing the first Chinese Bible he also prepares the first Chinese English dictionary and sort of opens the floodgates to the missionaries who come after him, because even though it's illegal to learn Chinese in China, you can learn it from books or you can learn it from Chinese in Southeast Asia.
Speaker 2:Again, just that hope that if they could just get some Bible tracts into the hands of the Chinese then religion would spread from there. I mean it's out of the scope of this book I talk about in my Taiping book, the Taiping Rebellion, which is the largest civil war in human history, probably 20 or 30 million people dead by the end. The leader of it is a Hakka Chinese man who gets his hand on these Christian pamphlets that have been sort of smuggled into China and he reads them and he reads about the Bible and then he has this epiphany that he's the son of God and that he's the younger brother of Jesus who has been sent to China to build a Christian kingdom. So the whole uprising is sort of an outgrowth of this Western Protestant missionary hope that if they can get the Bible into China they'll become Christian, and it just didn't play out the way that they had intended.
Speaker 1:Well, something was maybe lost a little bit in the translation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't control readers.
Speaker 1:But it is an astonishing achievement. I mean to be able to create a Chinese-English dictionary by somebody who, when they started, didn't speak Chinese at all. You know, it's scarcely credible to me that they had the sheer intellectual firepower to do that.
Speaker 2:It's amazing what Morrison did. I mean, you know, the King James had 50-something translators working on the King James Version of the Bible and Morrison was largely working alone with a couple of Chinese assistants.
Speaker 1:Translators of the King James Bible. Presumably they had known the language and we taught the language that they were translating from for many, many years by excellent teachers, and he's kind of making it up. It's astonishing.
Speaker 2:The way to look at it is. In the early 19th century, the only way you were going to learn Chinese is if God demanded that you do it. It is the missionaries who then open the door for the merchants, and then they piggyback. Morrison winds up going to work for the East India Company and he becomes their interpreter.
Speaker 1:A theme of your book seems to be a series of failed attempts to get proper diplomatic relations in place with the Chinese, and I think that's probably one of the. You know, the fact that they failed is probably key to why things ended so badly. But there was an absolutely extraordinary and in a way quite comic story of the Amherst embassy. Do you just want to explain what goes wrong for poor old Amherst? I mean, Amherst, everything goes. You just want to explain what goes wrong for poor old Amherst.
Speaker 2:I mean Amherst, everything goes wrong. In some ways it goes wrong the same way that it did for McCartney, that he also gets into these convoluted negotiations over the kowtow. You know he says that he'll perform the kowtow before the emperor if a high-ranking Chinese official will perform the kowtow before this portrait of the King of England that he brought along with him for this purpose. But the Amherst embassy just goes completely wrong on the way to Beijing and they're hustled along. They have no idea quite what's happening to them.
Speaker 2:And then they arrive in the wee hours of the morning near Beijing. They're stuffed into this little house which is crowded with people trying to get a glimpse of them, and then they're sort of told like the emperor is on the throne waiting for you right now we have to go in. And Amherst refuses and he says no, you know, my, my special outfit hasn't arrived yet and yeah, all these things that I had prepared for the embassy. And he refuses to go and one of the Chinese officials tries to drag him there and then his gentlemen retinue go for their swords and it very nearly turns into a bloody fight there near Beijing. But once again he's kicked out, he's sent on his way and, I think, just the most beautiful bit of poetic justice I've seen in this entire period. He's sailing on his way home from this complete failure of an embassy and his ship slams into a rock and sinks.
Speaker 1:I hope he's okay.
Speaker 2:He survives, they all survive, but it's just like the most fitting ending possible to just a complete travesty of an embassy. But the sad part is, if you look at the Chinese records of this, the emperor blames his officials for hustling Amherst on too quickly and for not being flexible enough about the kowtow. And the emperor was perfectly ready to be flexible about that and he realized that it was better to have negotiations and relations with the British than to send them away. So there was a real lost opportunity there and it's never going to be regained.
Speaker 1:I did wonder about that. It just seems so strange that they would treat Amherst the way they did. He's traveled through the night to get there and he hasn't slept. And they're saying right, you're on. You just think how is this possible, unless somebody is deliberately trying to sabotage things, and also Amherst again is one of these terrible accidents of history. But Amherst is ready to do the kowtow and he's dissuaded by, of all people, george Staunton, who says no, no, no. We must make sure that mutual respect is maintained.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amherst learns that basically McCartney lied when he got home and that he had done a sort of a fake kowtow. He claimed it was on one knee instead of two, but he had gone nine deep kneeling bows to the ground while wearing these big robes so that nobody could see how many knees were on the ground. Amherst is ready to be flexible. The emperor this is Qianlong's son at this point the Jiaqing emperor. He is ready to be flexible, and the officials just messed the whole thing up.
Speaker 2:I mean you got to understand that these officials, these intermediaries, they're primarily terrified of the emperor being blamed for doing something wrong. So if the emperor is on his throne and waiting for an audience, they're going to make that audience happen. Their concern is not how happy the British are.
Speaker 1:I want to ask a question about how government goes on in China. Maybe come to that later on, but I do think that's a theme that the inability of the emperor's officials to speak to him frankly because they are terrified of the consequences of, and so all kinds of misinformation was reaching the emperor up in Beijing.
Speaker 2:He had no idea why the war was going on so long. There's this wonderful line Julia Lovell has a lovely book on the opium war and there's this wonderful line in the middle of it where they're in the thick of the opium war and all this fighting has been going on, et cetera, et cetera. And the emperor at that point is the Daoguang emperor. The Daoguang emperor turns to one of his advisors and he says so, where exactly is England anyway? And the emperor is just so far isolated from the foreign relations that are happening around Canton.
Speaker 1:It is very striking the difference between, say, the Japanese, after the black ships come in, their reaction to this, which is to send out all these expeditions to try and find out as much as possible about the West, whereas the Chinese almost seem to be willfully uninterested in the power of the West. And what's going on there? Is it just that the Japanese have learned from the Chinese disaster, or is there something else going on? Or is it because China sees itself as so preeminent that it can't possibly learn from anybody else?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, with the Japanese. First of all, there is that they can learn from what happened to China, that the opium war predates the arrival of the black ships at Japan. They know how badly the Qing Empire suffered during the Opium War and how incompetent its navy was compared to the British. So the Japanese on the one hand, they benefit from knowing in advance that they are not going to be able to win in a military battle against an American Navy. The other, china and Japan, both have their civil wars in the 1860s.
Speaker 2:Japan, it's going to end with the Meiji Restoration and a dramatic change of government, which is going to be directly responding to shifts in the world at that time, which is going to be directly responding to shifts in the world at that time. So Japan's modernization, the transformation of its schools, the sending missions abroad to study constitutions, all of that comes out of a Meiji government that was not in power in the 1840s, that was the Tokugawa Shogunate. At the same time, in China, the war between the Qing and the Taiping is going to end with a Qing victory, and so it's the same Qing government that carries on into the 1870s and 80s and 90s, and it has entrenched interest in maintaining the culture of China as traditional a manner as possible. There is, by the 1870s, a reform movement in China that sort of grudgingly acknowledges the superiority of Western guns and ships, and China starts bringing in foreign advisors to teach them how to make weapons. They start buying machinery, but it's extremely limited compared to what happens in Japan.
Speaker 1:We've already talked a little bit about the tea, but there are these two products which are absolutely critical in your book, which is tea and opium. But I got the sense that opium was very much the little brother in terms of its importance in trade and I think people will maybe need to understand how the opium trade works, because the East India Company they don't trade in the opium, do they? As I understand it, they don't trade in China in the opium. Have I understood this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's not what you would expect. When I first started learning Chinese history, when I learned about this period, it was not what I had expected either To somebody who just knows a little bit about the opium war who's heard of it, knows the general contours or whatever. You sort of have this vision of the British marching around in China making people take opium or standing on the street corner and selling it, or, you know, standing on the street corner and selling it. So the reality was that the British could not go into China. You know they could go to Canton, but that was it. So the East India Company, which is going to really be the main force behind this opium trade, it's going to, I mean, at the peak of the trade, where the drug is illegal and it's being smuggled to China, to the coast, where Chinese criminal guilds will buy it. They do all of the distribution within China on their own terms.
Speaker 2:The only thing that the British can do is get the opium to the coast. The East India Company doesn't even do that. What the East India Company does is it monopolizes the production of opium in its territories of India and it does so in cruel ways like forcing farmers to stop growing food crops and grow opium poppies instead because this is so profitable. So the East India Company grows, produces opium by the early 19th century in huge amounts in India, amounts in India. Then typically it sells that opium at auction at Calcutta to middlemen. These are called the country traders. These are the folks who take on the real risk. Many of them are British, a number of them are Parsis from India.
Speaker 2:The country traders buy the opium at the auction in Calcutta, oftentimes on credit. Then they take all of the risk of shipping it to the coast of China. They're the ones who have built up relationships with Chinese criminal guilds, with the sort of the Chinese cartels that are going to be distributing the drug within China, and they're the ones who run the risk of having their ships boarded, having their goods confiscated. So they also, you know, they bribe everyone in sight.
Speaker 2:Once they have sold their opium, usually for silver. They can then come back to Canton and they pay back the East India Company for the credit that they used to buy the opium in the first place and that goes into the East India Company's treasury at Canton, the opium in the first place, and that goes into the East India Company's treasury at Canton. So the East India Company, without transporting any opium to China itself, gets a steady stream of revenue at its Canton factory from this illegal trade. And the trade itself is very much an international trade. It's coming together of British and Indian, especially Parsi and Chinese people working outside of the law by the 1830s on the mammoth scale, but it's not entirely in the hands of the British.
Speaker 2:And they're the ones who are going to fight a war over it. But they're also going to get squeezed out of the trade by the 1870s or 1880s.
Speaker 1:And I guess there are two big changes. We've got the new emperor. Is it Daoguang? Is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, daoguang, daoguang. And he comes to the throne, I think, in 1820. But things have also changed on the British side, because they've just come out of this massive war with Napoleon and their industrial revolution is now going full tilt. So they're a rather different force to what they were 50, 60 years ago. Right, they're much more powerful.
Speaker 2:They are. And yet the East India Company in 1820 is still the lone British firm that is allowed to trade with China. So China's relationship with Great Britain up until 1834, I'll come back to that in a moment. But up until 1834, british-chinese relations are entirely, with the exception of the very brief McCartney and Amherst embassies.
Speaker 2:British-chinese relations take place between merchants. You have the Hong merchants on the Chinese side, you have the East India Company on the British side. Americans come and go India Company on the British side. Americans come and go and are filling the spaces in between, but they have not had state to state relations. There is no permanent Chinese ambassador in Britain, there's no British ambassador in Beijing, or anything like that. The big shift in the big destabilization of this relationship, which is actually very orderly I mean the East India Company for all of its sins and it has an endless list of sins, I'm British, I won't hear this the East India Company for all of its production of opium, et cetera. Company for all of its production of opium, et cetera, et cetera. It at least was a unified company with a board of directors that could sort of act according to a plan.
Speaker 2:However, once you get to the 1830s that's the era of the free trade movement in Great Britain and regions of England, especially that had traditionally had no representation in parliament or very little, england, especially that had traditionally had no representation in Parliament or very little, were now population centers with booming industries demanding proper representation.
Speaker 2:And the whole reform movement that leads to the reconfiguration of Parliament and the empowering of places like Manchester also empowers a free trade movement that sees the East India Company as this vestige of the past. And you have very prominent politicians in Britain arguing that the East India Company's monopoly is the reason why Britain has such stagnating trade with China, in that we need to open China up to any British ship that has something to carry to China, it should get in on it. So by 1833, the East India Company loses its monopoly and then by 1834, it's pulled out of the picture at Canton and going forward. Really, any Tom Dick and Harry in the UK that has a ship that they can send to China can get in on the tea trade and the opium trade.
Speaker 1:And I was talking about the Emperor Duagwang, and he inherits sort of a pretty miserable situation because the country's been, as I understand it, kind of bankrupted. Trying to put down the White Lotus rebellions, which they have sort of managed to do, but it's cost them an arm and a leg so they no longer really have enough money to pay their soldiers properly, money to pay their soldiers properly. And again and again in Chinese history you got this and you mentioned it earlier. You got this question of silver and how central it is to the Chinese economy, and actually I only learned about this when I was speaking to Professor David Abelafia a couple of years ago. You had the Manila galleons once a year bringing silver into Manila from South America and then that was exchanged for whatever and and shipped back into china and and this was massively important to the to the chinese economy. So what's going wrong with, uh, with silver at this stage for the chinese?
Speaker 2:so silver? Yeah, silver is key to the entire situation here. The reason for the rise of the opium trade was in order to reduce the need of the British to bring silver to China. So during the 18th century the China trade was largely foreigners bringing silver in exchange for tea and silk and medicinal products and pottery and things like that. The Hong merchants didn't really want much of what the British had to offer. They bought a good amount of cotton goods, especially from India. But the flow of silver into China at the beginning of the 19th century I want to say about a third of Mexico's entire silver output was carried to China by American merchants. So while the Canton trade was largely a trade of silver for tea, the world's silver was flooding into China.
Speaker 2:So in the 18th century China was the world's largest net importer of silver and by imperial regulation silver was not supposed to go out from China. As all that silver comes pouring in, it helps to stabilize the economy at a time of rising population, et cetera, et cetera. The tipping point for that is going to be in the early 19th century, with national revolutions in Central and South America, the closure of silver mines and there's a worldwide shortage of silver. In the early 19th century it becomes harder and harder for the British to get the silver that they need to buy all of the tea that the British want. And that's where they settle on opium as being the one product that they can come up with. That seems to have no limit to how much they can sell along the China coast.
Speaker 2:So as a way of weaning their own side off of silver, the East India Company goes all in on opium. By the 1820s you hit a tipping point where the value of the opium going into China matches the value of the tea coming out. But here's where silver enters into the picture again. So they reach that tipping point and then the opium keeps growing and growing and growing until it dwarfs the amount of tea coming out Because the opium is a smuggling trade, because it's taking place along the coast of China and it's not regulated in any way. Those regulations against exporting Chinese silver don't apply. These are criminals. They're not paying attention to those rules. So China's silver supply starts flowing out of the country into the hands of opium smugglers, and then the East Indy company is just melting it down and shipping it back to England. That's what's ultimately going to cause the crisis.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned that the EIC lost its monopoly and so that meant they had to appoint a government representative to replace the EIC. I think they had some sort of a committee that ran affairs. So it happens again and again in history. You kind of wonder what were they thinking. They end up with Lord Napier, who is given careful instructions that at all times he's to behave in a submissive and conciliatory manner and off he goes.
Speaker 2:Within three weeks of arriving he's writing back to Lord Palmerston saying they should send a war fleet and we need to make war on China. Yeah, napier was not. He didn't exactly follow the letter of his instructions.
Speaker 1:And he does a decent thing, doesn't he, though? Because he drops down dead. I mean, the Chinese basically stiff, arm him, and he's able to get nothing done for weeks and weeks and months, and eventually he gives up and goes to Macau, where he promptly drops down dead of a fever.
Speaker 2:I mean one of the really important things that Napier brings to the fore, that here's this proud childhood friend of King William coming on his way to take charge of these nasty little British merchants. So the British government sends him as the superintendent of trade. This is to replace the East India Company's presence. But they give him no power over the British merchants at all. He has no legal authority over them.
Speaker 2:So you have all of these free trading British at Canton and you have Lord Napier who sort of presumes to be their leader, but none of them will listen to him. And so when he cooks up a storm in Canton and gets his hackles up because he feels insulted, because he didn't get the proper communication from the governor, et cetera, et cetera, he calls in gunboats, they shut down the trade and the British traders all turn on him and they kick him out and he has to go back to Canton in humiliation and, as you say, conveniently dies there. But what it brings to the fore is that the British merchants did not want him there and they did not support him and they did not want a war at that point. They just wanted their trade to continue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so now we've got two things happen, I guess. Well, let's just talk about the opium thing, because that was something I wanted to talk about. How do the Chinese see the opium problem? Because, as I understand it, there's quite a lot of debate inside China as to how best to deal with their problem here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a very complex question because different classes of Chinese have different views of the opium trade. Its use is spreading in China, not because it's being forced on anybody. It's a very expensive import good and its use is largely by wealthy people you know the people who have the money and who have the time to indulge in it. It's not seen as shameful in any way. If you've seen in museums or if you've seen images of opium pipes, these incredibly beautiful artistic creations for the smoking of opium, these were not things that you were doing secretly in a back alley or in the dark. You were doing this with your friends after a dinner party and there was a sign of refinement, et cetera. Ironically, the East India Company was shameless about this whole trade, to the point that they put their brand mark on every ball of opium and that fetched a higher price in China, the same way that having the proper French champagne label would be the key to the price of the bottle. So it's not seen as shameful by the people who used it. A lot of people who are not in a position to be able to use it are still making money from being couriers or from being part of these gangs that distribute it.
Speaker 2:It's the government that gets really worried about this. The Daoguang emperor is concerned both about the moral effects of opium, especially as it starts spreading in the military, because the military units that are supposed to suppress the traffic generally, surprise surprise wind up getting cheap opium and getting addicted themselves. So the emperor is concerned about the moral effects of the opium trade. He is at least as concerned about the economic effects of the opium trade, because the loss of silver means that the value of silver goes way up in China and the assessment of taxes on the population is based on each district coming up with a certain quota of silver. So as silver becomes more and more and more valuable the copper currency that most people live their lives in, they have to pay more and more and more of it to meet their tax burden. For people who have nothing to do with the opium trade at all, their taxes during the Daoguang era go up 50 or 60% and you start getting tax riots and social instability.
Speaker 2:So the emperor turns to his brain trust. He turns to a group of high-level officials and asks them for advice about what can be done about this problem, and it really boils down to a debate at court between two sides. One side believes that the trade in opium should be legalized and it should be regulated and it should be taxed and it should be taken taken into the open and very, very similar arguments for, like marijuana legalization in the United States. Yeah, very similar echoes there. And the other side are the suppressionists that the trade should be mercilessly suppressed. You know we should. We should ruthlessly punish anyone who who side are the suppressionists that the trade should be mercilessly suppressed. We should ruthlessly punish anyone who sells opium or trades in it, and the suppressionists are the ones who are going to win out.
Speaker 1:The man who is sent to see this through, the man the emperor appoints to finally put a stop to the opium trade. He is Lin I won't get the name right, yeah, lin Zixu. And he's up against the replacement to Lord Napier, who is a guy called Charles Elliot, and I would say, I mean again, lin is one of these people that you know it's hard not to be impressed by. He's you know, he's fantastically honest, he's obviously highly intelligent, he's very diligent and he absolutely sets two, first of all against the Chinese and then, ultimately, against the traders. But do you want to say a little bit about both, about Charles Elliott and about Lin, Because their clashes is really what sets it off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean Lin is a nationalist hero. Today there's a statue of him. In New York City, chinatown, there's a statue of Lin Zexu, the plaque that says pioneer of the war on drugs. So he was this sort of legendarily incorruptible official, a model of Confucian virtue and benevolence, a ruthless suppressor of opium in the areas where he had served. But he had no foreign affairs experience. And that's going to be important here, because in that debate at court between the legalizers and the suppressors, generally the ones who fell on the side of legalization were officials who had served at Canton. They knew what the British warships looked like, what kinds of guns they carried, and they knew that this had to be managed rather than suppressed. The suppressing faction like Lin Zixu, who was a leader of that faction, believed fully in China's military might and had no inkling that the Royal Navy would be anything other than just sort of a pesky little menace to be driven away by the might of the emperor's authority.
Speaker 2:So Lin Zixu comes down to Canton. As far as we know, he wasn't told to target the British. Really, his mission was to crack down on domestic use. So he starts rounding up dealers and users and various things, but then he of his own volition turns his sights on the British. He demands that all the British traders hand over all of the opium that they possess. And then they also are asked to sign a pledge that they will never bring opium to China again. And if they do, they agree that they should be executed. Oh blimey.
Speaker 2:The response to this on the part of these British traders is that they just collectively shrug their shoulders. For one thing, their opium is not there in Canton. This is a smuggling trade, so it's on ships offshore. They can send word to those ships to go sail off to Manila or Singapore or somewhere to keep their opium products safe and their whole experience. I mean, most of them are fairly new to China, but the long-term experience of the British merchants at Canton was that most officials eventually can be bought off.
Speaker 2:So they were expecting that Lin Zixu was going to make a big display and do all kinds of things for show and then probably take a bribe of some kind and go back to where he came from. So they actually weren't concerned at all that anything bad was going to happen came from. So they actually weren't concerned at all that anything bad was going to happen. Lin Zexu then you know, he ratchets up the pressure and that little compound, the 200 yards by 300 yards compound with the pretty buildings in it, he has it surrounded by troops, puts warships on the river next to it, withdraws all of the Chinese servants from the foreign compound and says you will not be released until you give up your opium and sign these pledges.
Speaker 1:If I got this right, he effectively. Well, it's a very nice prison, but the British are now in prison. Is that basically?
Speaker 2:it Exactly. The British are now effectively imprisoned and the way that this is going to play in the British press when news of it gets back to England is that these poor British merchants, they're in terror and they've been locked up in their quarters and they're at risk of their lives. And these poor people, if you actually go and look at the letters and journals of the folks who were there, it's just this big bachelor party. Basically it's all these young men involved in trade and their biggest issue is that none of them knows how to cook. It's like the Chinese servants have been withdrawn. There's this merchant from near Boston, robert Bennett Forbes, and he talked about one of his friends trying to make ham and eggs and saying it came out looking like the sole of a shoe. So they've got good stores of wine. They enjoy themselves. The Hong merchants smuggle in plenty of food for them to eat and again, their goal is figure.
Speaker 1:He's keen to work with the Chinese and I think he's actually been working already with the local governor to try to meet the demands which are being made. But he really doesn't cope at all with Lin, does he? It's a complete I don't want to say a mental breakdown, but he really seems to panic.
Speaker 2:It is a mental breakdown. I mean, there's a point when he writes a letter to his sister saying like don't tell anyone this, but I can no longer keep a firm grip on my thoughts. Charles Elliot, an extremely well-meaning official yeah, so he's the replacement for Lord Napier. He isn't nearly as arrogant as Napier had been. He's much more conciliatory towards the Chinese government. He himself is morally opposed to the opium trade. However, he's extremely anxious and he's given to panic attacks.
Speaker 2:Robert Bennett Forbes, the American merchant that I mentioned he refers to this in one of his letters as Elliot's mad freaks mentioned. He refers to this in one of his letters as Elliot's mad freaks. This is really going to be the seed of the opium war, that while the British merchants are all just trying to cook for themselves and waiting out Linza Shue, it's Charles Elliot who gets it into his head that if they don't hand over their opium, linza Shue is probably going to start rounding them up and executing them and he's going to chop the heads off of the British merchants. And Charles Elliott is going to get blamed for it and that'll be the end of his reputation and the end of his career. So he decides that he has to make the British merchants hand over their opium to Linza Xu, but, as with Napier, he has no legal authority over them. He has no way of making them do what he tells them to do. So he comes up with this plan. And again, this is the real root of the opium war. He comes up with this plan of how to make them hand over their opium and the plan which completely baffles them when he first tells them about it and they make him repeat himself a couple of times. His plan is that he will buy all of their opium on behalf of the British government and he will sign promissory notes that they will be reimbursed by the British government for the full market value of their opium.
Speaker 2:Oh no, and now here you have these merchants who, they are concerned that if Linzi Shoes Cr crackdown in China continues, they won't be able to sell their opium and there's really no other market for it in the world in that quantity. So they sign it all over to Charles Elliott. They even buy more from India to hand over to him. And then he collects all of that and then he hands it all over to Linza shoe and the irony of all of this. And then he hands it all over to Linza Shu.
Speaker 2:And the irony of all of this is not lost on them at all. One of the little English papers that they wrote for themselves in Canton talks about how the health of the young and lovely Queen Victoria was drunk in flowing cups on the occasion of her becoming the largest holder of opium in the world on the occasion of her becoming the largest holder of opium in the world. But this means that when Lin Zishu destroys 20,000 chests of opium, each of them with 133 pounds of the raw drug, when Lin Zishu destroys those, he is destroying the property of Queen Victoria. And if he had been destroying the property of individual merchants engaged in an illegal smuggling trade, the British government wouldn't have done anything about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they have said repeatedly don't look to us to recover your losses if things go wrong. Right?
Speaker 2:Exactly Like it's their problem. They took the risk of this illegal trade, but thanks to all those promissory notes that Charles Eliot signed, the British government now owes £2 million to the opium traders, at a time when the whole British government budget was about £50 million a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they've been spending money on things like abolishing slavery, because they've paid out a lot on that just recently, I think, because they've paid out a lot on that just recently.
Speaker 2:I think yeah, and incidentally that's, I mean that's. I believe what Charles Eliot had in mind was the slavery reparations.
Speaker 1:Oh, I see.
Speaker 2:Sort of the paying off of slave owners to compensate them for their lost property. I think that's really what he had in mind with we will buy the opium from these opium traders, and then the trade can end Right.
Speaker 1:But the panic doesn't stop there, because they take time to hand over the chests and Lin is getting more and more threatening. So in the end, elliot sort of shoos everybody off to Macau and sort of Lin kind of pursues them there, and so they all flee off to Hong Kong. It's like this extraordinary decamping. It's like this extraordinary decamping, it's like it's completely out of control at this stage.
Speaker 2:No, Elliot mismanaged the entire thing, but he's the reason why British got Hong Kong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was that. But then the question is, is there going to be a war? Because I think it's one of the best chapters in the book where you describe where the House of Commons meets to debate a resolution, where I think the conservatives put forward a resolution basically saying no war, thank you very much. And the way the government at the time has to defend themselves and you bring out all the arguments and there isn't a lot of time or sympathy really on any side for the opium dealers. It's quite striking.
Speaker 2:That was one of my favorite chapters to write because to me that was one of the most interesting episodes of all of this. I think the opium war gets painted in such one-dimensional terms normally and I think, as people in China learn about it, it's like well, of course the British went to war over opium. That's what they do. They go and conquer places and they do things like forced drugs. And it wasn't like that at all.
Speaker 2:There was a ferocious debate in the House of Commons Again. The measure to end the war by recalling all of the government ministers who had launched it failed by five votes out of 522 that were cast. It was a razor's margin, as you said. It was the Whigs who started the war and it was the conservatives who tried to end it. The conservatives were eventually going to take power and continue it, but the moral issues of the Opium War were not at all lost on the British public at this time. This name, opium War, wasn't used as a name for this war in China until the 20th century Nationalists started calling it the Yapian Zhangjiang. The term Opium War was an English-language term for the war that was used by the Times of London at the time that it was happening, as they argued that Britain was going to war in order to support the interests of drug dealers and that this was shameful.
Speaker 1:And there's two characters which are quite interesting in the debate. I mean one is George Staunton who again, he's been incredibly sympathetic to the Chinese and he's been very anti the opium. But he probably swings the vote because he comes out in favor of the war and, as I understand it, he says it's not actually about opium, it's about prestige.
Speaker 2:That's the strongest argument that the pro-war side can come up with in the context of British politics and British morality. The position of the government is that this has nothing to do with opium. This is about protecting British merchants who have traveled abroad for trade, who have followed the de facto rules. Everyone knew that opium was illegal, but they also knew that it was never enforced. It was about the safety of British in a foreign country, all of these sorts of things, and it was about honor and that if the British back down in this case, then China is just going to become more high-handed towards the British and then when the Indians see that, then they're going to see that the British can be pushed around and there goes our colony in India, et cetera, et cetera. It was heartbreaking to me when Staunton did that.
Speaker 2:Staunton, he's the one at the start of the book. He's the little boy who talks to Chen Long. He's sort of the sad kid who's put by his dad on the ship to go off and make his living at the factory in Canton. He rises up through the ranks, he comes back to England and he's a voice of reason and respect for China. He's viewed as Britain's greatest authority on China and he's the one that you would expect in the middle of the and by the time of the opening war. He's in parliament and he's just this sad figure. He has a terrible speaking voice. Nobody can really hear what he's saying. People walk out of the room when he starts talking in the House of Commons. People walk out of the room when he starts talking in the House of Commons. But all of the momentum of his life seems to be leading up to him taking a moral stand in the House of Commons and saying we have to trade respectfully with the Chinese on legal terms and get rid of these rascally opium traders. But no, he does exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2:And as a historian, there is something really wonderful about a character that you have been working closely with and you have been following their life and reading their correspondence and their diaries. And then a point comes when they do something that's just the opposite of what you thought they would do in that situation. The opposite of what you thought they would do in that situation. And as a historian, I love that, because that's a point where you realize that they are human and humans are very. You know they change their minds and they take. You know they actual human beings generally don't represent a certain principle, and this is sort of for me where he became three-dimensional.
Speaker 2:But that argument it's one that gets used in the United States too. Yeah, of course that Americans are generally very strongly against the opium war, but one of its most prominent supporters was John Quincy Adams, who is hardly a fan of the British, gives a speech at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston society in Boston, and sort of similar to what you said about George Staunton. He gives a speech where he says, you know, he says basically, like opium wasn't the reason for this war, and he says, like opium was no more the cause of the war in China than tea had been the cause of the American revolution. You know it was incidental and he said the real reason for this war is the kowtow and it's the refusal of the Chinese to treat foreigners as equals in trade or in politics. And to him that was enough justification for the British to go to war. And for the British who supported the war they characterized it very much as a war of making the Chinese treat the British as equals.
Speaker 1:I don't know whether I would agree with that that it was about the kowtow, but I do think a large part of the problem was that the Chinese had no idea what the British were thinking and the British had no idea what the Chinese were thinking, and that if embassies had been set up where you had a permanent representative, where views could actually be exchanged, I wonder whether the war would have taken place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or even if the imperial government had listened more to the officials who had actual experience with foreign affairs. There's this sort of caricature of China at the time of the Opium War that China was this closed world and they were completely oblivious to the rise of British power. That's true of the emperor. It was not true of the officials who served at Canton. They knew exactly what British warships were capable of. They had interacted with people from Great Britain for generations. They were much more knowledgeable about what worked and what didn't in relations with foreigners through trade. The Opium War comes about because the government in China won't listen to them.
Speaker 1:I don't know after the edit how far we're in, but we're quite a long way in and we haven't yet got to the war. But that's fine because that's kind of how your book is structured, because you're much more interested in what caused the war than actually the course of the war itself. But is it worth saying a bit about how the war does go and in particular how poor old Charge Elliot once again sort of fails to understand what his role is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the reason why I didn't read it in detail at the end of the book is largely because, once the war actually happens, it's a foregone conclusion. It's pitting the largest, most powerful, most modern navy on earth against an empire that has not had a seagoing navy in over a century, because it just hasn't needed one.
Speaker 1:But let me just push back on that a little bit, because China is this vast land empire. So how are the British? I mean, they've got a fantastic navy, but most of China is inland right and China has a huge army as well. So how are the British able to succeed against the Chinese?
Speaker 2:The British succeed by targeting cities that are accessible by water, which is a lot of coastal China. There aren't actually that many battles fought in the Opium War. It takes a long time, it takes a couple of years to come to its conclusion. But you have to keep in mind that for the British naval commanders in China to get instructions from London it takes a better part of a year. It takes nearly six months to send a ship to England and then they have to wait for word back. There's no telegraph, there's nothing like that yet. So it's a slow moving war. But the British absolutely target cities that they can attack from the water and there are proposals at court that they should draw the British inland and then just massacre them, which possibly could have worked. It worked in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2:The British are not nearly as powerful on land as they are on the water, but to draw the war inland would have meant a huge dislocation of the population. It would have meant huge civilian casualties and throughout all of this the emperor up in Beijing doesn't really see or recognize this as being a major war. It's going to go down in the Qing imperial annals as being sort of a border skirmish or a foreign incident, sort of a series of battles fought at cities, but he has no interest in dragging it out or dragging it inland. By contrast, the Kangxi emperor in the 17th century, when he was faced with Ming loyalist pirates on the coast, evacuated the whole coast of China, forced the entire coastal population to move inland for 20 years while they built a navy to go and conquer Taiwan and put down the pirates. 20 years while they built a navy to go and conquer Taiwan and put down the pirates. So it's just a sign that the Opium War was not viewed in Beijing as being an existential war of any kind. This wasn't something that threatened the dynasty.
Speaker 1:I can't remember if it was your book or Julia Lovell's, but there was a line to the effect that after about a year, the emperor still wasn't aware that China was at war in the first place. I'm not sure that can be true, but it does say something.
Speaker 2:I should also say, just anecdotally, that one of the reasons why I don't treat the war in detail is because Julia Lovell had written a wonderful book treating the war in detail and I read that. I had initially been after my typing book. I was thinking of doing a book on the opium war. Julia's book had just come out, so I read that and I was like, well, nobody needs another book, just on the opium war right now. And that's what sent me back into looking at. Well, I think that the war itself, the outcome, was a foregone conclusion. But how did the British and the Chinese actually get to the point where this war could happen?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what are the ultimate terms? How do they settle it? This war could happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what are the ultimate terms? How do they settle it? The treaty that ends the war, it's called the Treaty of Nanjing.
Speaker 2:In China it is taken as the first of what are known as the unequal treaties, which is a series of treaties that China had to sign with foreign powers at gunpoint during the 19th century, where the terms were essentially dictated by the foreigners. So this is the very first one of those. The Chinese have to pay for the opium and they have to pay for Britain's expenses in going to war. So there's something like a 20 million silver dollar indemnity that they have to pay Britain. They have to open trade somewhat. There are five ports in China that are opened as so-called treaty ports for the British, where the British can now live in those cities and own buildings and have warehouses, and their rights are protected. So there's the beginnings of the opening of trade that McCartney had hoped for and that James Flint had hoped for. That Britain gets that from this treaty. They take Hong Kong as an outright colony and they're going to have that until 1997.
Speaker 2:And then, in one of the more insidious terms of the treaty, the British get extraterritoriality, which means that in China and this will expand over the course of the 19th century, but at its fullest flower. It means that the British, and then later other foreigners, simply are not subject to Chinese law, that if they commit any crime while in China, they have to be tried by a British consular court. And the last thing that I would say, though, about this treaty is that it does not legalize the opium trade. There is no clause that allows opium. The opium trade is going to pick right back up again as a smuggling trade, but although the British could have demanded that the trade be legalized, if they had done so, the British government spent the whole war bending over backwards to say this has nothing to do with the opium trade, it's all about honor, et cetera. It just would have been too crass, then, to use the treaty to legalize opium.
Speaker 1:But there's another point there isn't there and this plays into the debates that we have today which is that the smugglers don't want it legalized either, because then they're kind of squeezed out of the picture.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I mean you got to figure. These smugglers have invested huge amounts of time and capital in building ships that can sail quickly up and down the China coast. They've invested in relationships with the Chinese criminal guilds that they trade with, and all of these relationships and these ships are going to be pointless if you can just trade opium legally at Canton. So the smugglers, their advantage, is very much in keeping this as a smuggling trade and they have the ear of the government. William Jardine, one of the leading British opium merchants, very much has the ear of Lord Palmerston during this war. I mean, the coastal maps that the British warships use are the ones that were sort of figured out and drawn by the smugglers for their own trade. They hand those over to the British government for military use.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, luke, I think we've done that a lot of justice. Stephen, thank you so much, and anybody who's listening, please do seek out the book, because it is I don't know. It kind of reads like a novel. It's absolutely terrific and I just can't recommend it enough.
Speaker 2:Thank you, russell, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.